Fiendish Killers Read online

  A detective waiting at a station saw Chikatilo sweating profusely and breathing heavily, with bloodstains on his clothes, took his name and checked with his superiors to see if there was any information about him. When news came back that he had been a suspect, he was arrested. As it turned out, Chikatilo had just murdered twenty-year-old Svetlana Korostik. After ten days in custody he finally confessed to around fifty-two more murders, many more than the police had been aware of.

  Monster in a cage

  Chikatilo was brought to trial in April 1992. By this time, he was mentally ill and was locked inside a cage. The cage was designed as much to keep him safe from his victims’ relatives as to stop him from lashing out. At his trial, it became clear that Chikatilo had completely lost his mind: he was no longer the neat, sober-looking individual he had been when he was arrested, but had become a shaven-headed monster who ranted and raved at the judge and jury.

  After a high profile trial that drew many shocked spectators, and that was reported in the media internationally, Chikatilo was convicted of all the murders he was charged with, and received a total of fifty-two death sentences. On February 15, 1994, he was executed by a single bullet to the back of the head. The reign of terror of the cannibal serial killer had finally come to an end.

  Gary Heidnik

  Gary Heidnik was an American killer who abducted a number of women and kept them captive in his basement, murdering two of them and causing extensive injuries to the others. His horrific crimes included kidnapping, murder, torture, sexual abuse of all kinds and cannibalism. A high-school dropout and ex-army soldier with a schizoid personality disorder, he committed numerous crimes, including beating and raping his Filipino wife, abducting and sexually abusing a mentally subnormal young woman, and then, worst of all, abducting five women and holding them in his house, inflicting all manner of torture on them until two of them died. At that point, he dismembered the first victim’s body, cooked it and fed it to the surviving victims. Eventually, one of the captives escaped and went to the police, who searched his house and found the scene of horror in the basement. At the trial that followed, Heidnik claimed his innocence, but the jury found him guilty and on July 6, 1999, he was executed by lethal injection.

  Schizoid personality disorder

  Gary Michael Heidnik was born in November 1943 in Eastlake, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. His mother was an alcoholic and his parents, Michael and Ellen, divorced soon after the birth of his younger brother, Terry. First, the boys went to live with Ellen and her new husband, and after that, lived with their father and his new wife. The boys were mistreated by their parents, in particular their father, who would humiliate Gary by hanging his stained sheets out of the window for the neighbours to see whenever he wet the bed. As a child, Gary also fell out of a tree while at school, leaving him with a strangely shaped head, which made him an object of ridicule for his schoolmates. Interestingly, a number of serial killers, torturers and otherwise violent individuals, have sustained serious injuries to the head at an early point in their lives, and there appears to be some correlation between this sort of accident and violent behaviour. Gary’s brother Terry, himself a man with serious mental problems, often commented that he believed Gary’s extremely violent behaviour started with the head injury he received from his fall as a child.

  As a teenager, Gary was keen to join the army, and his father arranged for him to attend Staunton Military Academy in Virginia. He did well there, but after two years he suddenly left and went to live with his father again. At eighteen, he joined the regular army and trained as a medic, but he began to suffer from mental illness and was discharged with a disability pension and a diagnosis of ‘schizoid personality disorder’. After this, he tried his hand at various jobs but eventually left all of them, and for the next few years found himself in and out of mental institutions. When his mother committed suicide by drinking poison, his condition deteriorated and he became mute for long periods of time. He also became extremely violent, at one point attacking his brother Terry. When his brother visited him during his period of recuperation, he told him that if he had died, he would have soaked his body in acid to dispose of it.

  From this point, Heidnik began to show extreme signs of mental disorder, saluting and rolling up his trousers, wearing the same clothes all the time, and giving up any semblance of personal hygiene. He then decided to start his own ‘church’, along with his girlfriend, who was also mentally subnormal, and styled himself ‘Bishop Heidnik’. Strangely, although he was so crazed, he was good at financial investments, and showed a great deal of skill at making money for the church, amassing a sizeable profit during this time.

  Abuse of retarded woman

  In 1976, Heidnik fired a gun at his landlord, slightly injuring the man’s face. The police charged him with aggravated assault and carrying an unlicensed pistol, and when the house was sold, the owners found a hole dug into the floor of the basement containing boxes of pornographic magazines. Heidnik’s next brush with police came when he took his girlfriend’s retarded sister out for the day from the mental hospital where she lived, and kept her prisoner in his apartment for several days. When staff from the home came out to fetch her, they found that she had been raped, vaginally and anally, and had contracted a sexually transmitted disease in the process. Heidnik was arrested and charged with the crime. He conducted his own defence, pleading not guilty, but was given a three- to seven-year jail sentence, most of which he actually spent in mental institutions.

  When he was released, Heidnik resumed the sick relationships he had always had with women. He seemed to be attracted to mentally subnormal black women, and had a crazed notion of fathering a host of children by them. Early on in his adult life, he had had a girlfriend who had borne him a child. A little later on he dated a retarded young woman whom he regularly beat and starved. Another woman he had a relationship with, also mentally subnormal, disappeared soon after meeting Heidnik. He then married a mail-order bride, a young Filipino woman named Betty. When she arrived to meet him, in September 1985, he took her to the marital home where a retarded woman was sleeping in his bed. She was disturbed by this, but agreed to marry him, mainly because she could not afford the fare back to her country. However, a week later, she returned to the house to find her new husband having sex with three women in their bed. She demanded to be sent back to the Philippines but he refused, forcing her to stay in the house and cook for his many female guests. He also forced her to watch him having sex with them. Eventually, she escaped with the help of others from the Filipino community in her neighbourhood and went to the police, who charged Heidnik with sexual offences. Later, Betty gave birth to a son by Heidnik.

  Torture and cannibalism

  Once Betty had left, Heidnik began his career of sexual deviancy and violence in earnest, abducting five women and holding them in the basement of his house in Philadelphia. He chained them up, kept them in filthy conditions, starved them, sexually abused them, beat them and tortured them. When the first woman died of mistreatment, he dismembered her body, ground pieces of it in a food processor and mixed it with dog food, which he forced the surviving women to eat. The victim’s arms and legs were kept in a freezer, while her ribs were cooked in the oven. He boiled her head in a pot on the cooker. The next woman died when he electrocuted her in the bath, bound in chains, applying an electric current to the chains. He tortured the remaining women by digging a large pit to throw the victims in when they misbehaved, which he would then cover with planks. Another of his tortures involved hanging the women up by their wrists and forcing metal screwdrivers into their ears, which gave them permanent hearing loss. He also encouraged the women to fight with each other and tell him stories, rewarding them with small privileges when they did so.

  After months of this hellish existence, one of the women managed to escape, and on March 24, 1987, she left Heidnik’s house, saying that she was visiting her family and promising to return with another ‘wife’ for him. Over the time they h
ad spent together, she had managed to persuade him that they had a special, close relationship and he believed her when she had said she would recruit another victim for him. However, the minute she was out of his sight, she went straight to her boyfriend’s house and then to the police.

  Scene of depravity

  At first the police did not believe her story, suspecting that she was suffering from some kind of delusions. However, when she raised the hem of her trousers and they saw the cuff marks on her ankles, they realised that the story was true. The police raided the house and found a scene of depravity that shocked even the most hardened officers. However, despite all the evidence to the contrary, Heidnik maintained his innocence and continued to plead not guilty, even taking to defending himself in court. This time, however, he stood no chance of getting off. He was convicted on an array of charges, including first-degree murder, five counts of rape, six counts of kidnapping, four counts of aggravated assault and one count of deviate sexual intercourse. The jury found him unanimously guilty of the murders of two of the women, Deborah Dudley and Sandra Lindsay, and also of the other charges. After making an attempt at suicide, he was executed by lethal injection on July 6, 1999. When his father was told that his son was going to die, he replied that he wasn’t interested. Unsurprisingly, nobody came forward to claim Heidnik’s body for burial.

  Ed Kemper

  The notorious Co-ed Killer, Edmund Emil Kemper, got his nickname by killing and dismembering six young women whom he picked up as hitchhikers in the area of Santa Cruz, California. However, he also committed a number of other murders, including killing his grandparents and his mother. He was only a teenager when he shot both his grandparents dead, having been sent to live with them on their farm. As an adult, he committed a series of murders, mostly of young female hitchhikers and committed gross acts of necrophilia and cannibalism on their corpses. During this time he covered his clues, but as time went on and his madness took hold, he lost all sense of caution. Finally, he murdered his mother and a friend of hers in a fit of furious rage, before finally giving himself up to the authorities. His behaviour was never explained, and at his trial he was seen as a sociopath rather than a psychopath. As a result he was judged to be sane, even though he had spent a good deal of time in mental hospitals as a teenager. The reason he gave for killing the women and the members of his own family, was, he said, ‘to see what it felt like’. Words that struck a chill into all who followed his horrific exploits, and persuaded the judge at his trial to give him a life sentence for murder.

  Killing the family cat

  Edmund Kemper III was born on December 18, 1948, in Burbank, California, into a troubled family. His father, who went by the nickname E.E., had been decorated in World War II; his mother, Clarnell, a domineering, critical woman, was not happy with her husband, and after a tempestuous relationship the couple parted. His mother took Ed, who was then aged nine, and his sister to live in Helena, Montana. It was here that Ed began to show the first signs of serious mental disturbance. One of the strangest aspects of his behaviour was that he tortured animals in the most horrible way. In an incident that defies belief, he buried the family cat alive in the back garden and when it was dead, cut off its head and put it on a stick. He kept the head on the stick in his bedroom, along with other unpleasant animal parts. How his mother managed not to notice what was going on is still a mystery. He also mutilated his sister’s dolls, pulling their heads, arms and legs off and acting out peculiar sexual rituals on them. At this time, he also fell in love with a teacher at his school and confided his feelings to his sister. His sister asked him, as a joke, whether he would like to kiss the teacher, and Ed replied that if he did, he would have to kill her beforehand. Later on, these words were to become prophetic.

  Kemper’s mother Clarnell seems to have exacerbated the situation, humiliating her son on every occasion that she could and continually berating him in front of others. Eventually, she forced him to sleep in the basement under lock and key, because she was afraid that he would attack his sisters and subject them to sexual acts. She herself was also afraid of him. By this time he had grown into an extremely tall young man, inheriting his height from both parents. His size marked him out from his contemporaries and he was teased at school, but seemed unable to fend for himself and became extremely afraid of being bullied. Thus, although he was a large, violent young man, he was also timid and very awkward with people in general.

  Edmund’s relationship with his mother soon deteriorated to the point where she declared that she had washed her hands of him. She referred to him as ‘a real weirdo’ and when his behaviour became completely out of control, sent him to live with his estranged father. His father proved equally inadequate to deal with the situation, and in turn sent him to live with his elderly paternal grandparents on their farm at North Fork, Carolina.

  Country life – with a rifle

  By now, Kemper was fifteen. To begin with, country life seemed to suit the teenager and he spent his days shooting animals and birds with a rifle. However, tragedy struck when, on August 27, 1964, Kemper turned the gun on his grandparents, shooting his grandmother dead as she put the finishing touches to a children’s book she was working on. When his grandfather came home from grocery shopping, Kemper shot him dead as well. Asked later why he had done it, all he could find to reply was, ‘I just wondered what it would feel like to shoot grandma and grandpa.’

  Kemper was pronounced to be mentally ill and sent to a secure hospital at Atascadero, where he remained for the next five years. He was then judged to be much improved with regard to his mental health and was paroled into his mother’s care in Santa Cruz, a college town in San Francisco Bay. Once released, he applied to join the police, but was turned down on the grounds that he was too tall (by now he was 6 ft 9 in). After that, he did numerous odd jobs, never settling for long at any one task. He began to drink regularly at a police bar called the Jury Room, where he befriended numerous detectives and bought himself a car similar to those used by the police as undercover vehicles.

  He started using the car to pick up young female hitch-hikers, customising the car by making it impossible to open the passenger side door from the inside. In retrospect, it seems clear that he was waiting to claim his next victim – it was just a matter of time until he found the right moment.

  Murder, rape and necrophilia

  On May 7, 1972, the next tragedy struck when he picked up two eighteen-year-old students, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, who were hitching to Stanford University. He drove them down a dirt road, stabbed them both to death and then took them back to his apartment. There he sexually assaulted the bodies and took photographs of them, before cutting their heads off, putting the bodies in plastic bags, burying them on a nearby mountainside and throwing the heads into a ravine. Four months later, he killed again. This victim was fifteen-year-old Aiko Koo, whom he strangled, raped and then dissected. The next day, with her head in the boot of his car, he met with court psychiatrists, who declared him to be sane.

  Another four months went by, and then Kemper murdered another student, Cindy Schell. By this time he’d bought a gun, which he used to shoot Schell dead after forcing her into the boot of his car. Now following a pattern, he raped, beheaded and dissected her corpse before disposing of it, burying the head in his mother’s garden.

  Less then a month passed before he struck again, shooting hitchhikers Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Lin before putting both bodies in the boot and leaving them there while he went to have dinner with his mother. When they had finished eating he decapitated them, taking Lin’s headless corpse home to rape.

  The final victim: his mother

  Clearly, Kemper’s madness was now out of control, and over the Easter weekend of 1973 he finally turned on his mother. He lay in wait for her at her home and when she appeared he beat her to death with a hammer. He then decapitated and raped her, before attempting to throw her larynx into the waste disposal unit. In a confused attempt to cover his
tracks, he then invited one of his mother’s friends over, Sally Hallett, and when she arrived he murdered her as well. Having committed the two murders, he took to his heels and fled, driving west to Colorado. When he got there, he telephoned his buddies on the Santa Cruz police force and told them what he’d done. At first they thought he was joking and did not believe him, but after visiting his mother’s apartment, they saw only too well that he was telling the truth and immediately ordered his arrest. He gave himself up without a fight and seemed relieved that his killing spree had now come to an end.

  When Kemper was brought to trial, the jury concluded that he was sane and he was found guilty on eight counts of murder. He received a life sentence but apparently asked to be tortured to death. Since that time, he has continued to serve his sentence, appearing to enjoy his notoriety. On one occasion he was interviewed live and asked, ‘What do you think when you see a pretty girl walking down the street?’ His chilling reply was, ‘One side of me says I’d like to talk to her, date her. The other half of me says “I wonder how her head would look on a stick.” ’